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Summary
Sections 11-15
11
Demon meets with Miss Barks, who informs him that his mother won’t be ready to take him back in three weeks as planned. Instead, they’ll start with supervised visits, and Demon will need to learn to get along with Stoner better. When she asks about life with Creaky, Demon tells her that Creaky is brutal, especially toward Tommy. Miss Barks asks if Creaky has ever hit Demon, and when Demon says no, she drops the matter. Because Tommy and Swap-Out are with a different foster care agency, she has no authority to intervene for them.
A rare bright spot in Demon’s life is the growing attention and favoritism he receives from Fast Forward. Fast Forward praises Demon’s artistic talent after looking at his comics, inspiring Demon to create drawings for him and the other boys. He illustrates Fast Forward as a hero named Fast Man, who can bend anyone to his will, while casting Creaky as the supervillain Creak Evil. Demon also draws the other boys as heroes based on Fast Forward’s nicknames for them: Wildman and Bones.
During a supervised visit, Demon sees his mother, who looks healthier and tells him she’s doing a longer, more expensive rehab program that Stoner is paying for. She promises that once she’s back, they’ll do fun things as a family. When she asks if living on the farm is fun, Demon bluntly tells her about shoveling cow manure and living among mice and other vermin. His mother begins to cry, but Demon remains detached, reflecting that he’s tried every other emotion with her and none have made a difference.
The Peggots also visit Demon, and he secretly hopes they’ll take him home, but they’re only there to check in. Mrs. Peggot is horrified by the squalor in the house, but even she and the others seem charmed by Fast Forward. Before leaving, Mrs. Peggot tells Demon to keep praying, and he imagines she offers the same advice to Mariah when they visit her in prison.
12
Demon’s mother gets out of rehab, and their visits begin taking place at her home. Demon is frustrated by the visits because they feel like a tease, but his mother explains that Stoner isn’t comfortable with Demon moving back in yet.
On the rides back to the farm, Miss Barks shares her dream of becoming a teacher and the heartbreak she felt when her friends went to college while she couldn’t. Now, she’s taking night courses at a community college while working for DSS. When she asks what Demon wants to be when he grows up, he’s caught off guard—no one has ever asked him that before. His only answer is that he wants to still be alive.
Demon spends a day with his mother, and she reveals that she’s pregnant. Excited to be a brother, Demon enjoys their time together, measuring their heights and discovering he’s finally taller than her—just by a hair. However, when he asks where the baby’s room will be, his mother becomes moody, mentioning arguments with Stoner about moving to a bigger house. Stoner, she says, had wanted more "fun times" before committing to having a baby.
As part of their family reconciliation, Demon is required to talk to Stoner for a few minutes when he gets home. His mother, who has been happy and relaxed all day, immediately tenses up. Stoner asks Demon if he’s learning to improve his attitude in foster care, and Demon’s mother mentions his excitement about the baby. Stoner dismisses this, remarking that the baby won’t be a “mulatto,” referencing Demon’s father’s Melungeon heritage. He also mentions learning about oppositional disorder in counseling and insists that Demon would need to be medicated to move back in. Furthermore, he threatens to get an injunction to prevent Demon from spending time with the Peggots. Demon realizes he doesn’t want to go back to the farm but also can’t imagine staying with Stoner and his mother under these conditions.
13
One morning, the boys wake up to find there’s no running water—the well has been drained. Creaky is furious, as farming is a constant battle to avoid foreclosure, and any waste is catastrophic. He blames Tommy, whose responsibility it is to manage the well water, but the boys all know the real culprit is Fast Forward, who had been washing his car the night before. Demon expects Fast Forward to own up, knowing Creaky won’t punish him, but Fast Forward stays silent. As a result, Tommy is given 20 lashes. Later, Demon finds Tommy in the barn, drawing skulls. When Demon jokingly asks if he’s goth, Tommy explains that he lacks Demon’s artistic talent. He draws skulls because they’re easy and always there when he wants to see their faces.
Meanwhile, Demon’s mother is recovering from rehab but remains unhappy. Stoner is unsupportive about the pregnancy and insists she must pay for expenses herself, forcing her to work grueling hours at Walmart despite her nausea. Demon and the boys watch Fast Forward play football, and Demon is captivated by his skill and charisma, deciding he wants to be just like him when he grows up.
That summer, while doing exhausting work in the tobacco fields, Demon notices Tommy gathering flowers and placing them on two small mounds of dirt. When Demon asks about it, Tommy reveals that since he’s never seen his parents’ graves, he creates makeshift ones at every foster home he’s lived in.
14
Demon describes the grueling and hazardous work of farming tobacco, which keeps the boys out of school for most of October as they rush to harvest before the frost. One day, while working in the fields, Demon starts to feel sick, eventually vomiting and collapsing. Tommy finds him and explains that Demon has nicotine poisoning from not wearing gloves. Demon had seen Fast Forward working without gloves, but adults who smoke heavily build up a tolerance, while children are more vulnerable to the toxins.
Creaky constantly yells at the boys for any mistakes, threatening them with the prospect of stripping green leaves in February, a task he describes as a dreadful punishment. Demon brushes off the threat, thinking he’ll be long gone by then—only to later admit that he ended up spending many years farming tobacco, making stripping green leaves his reality after all.
He delves into the sociopolitical background of how tobacco farming declined. The government once supported tobacco farmers through price controls and subsidies to balance supply and demand. However, as the health risks of tobacco became undeniable, these supports were phased out, triggering widespread foreclosures. Displaced farmers often moved in with family or relied on disability payments, clinging to their land out of pride and necessity. Tobacco became the only viable crop for small-acreage farms, even as companies like Philip Morris spread propaganda claiming the cancer scare was a myth—a way for city elites to undermine rural livelihoods. Many farmers, left with no other options, stubbornly held onto their identity as “proud tobacco farmers,” symbolized by the bumper stickers on their trucks, as long as they could.
15
On Demon’s eleventh birthday, no one acknowledges the occasion. Maggot forgets, and his mother doesn’t schedule a visit. Disappointed, Demon tells the boys at the foster home, and Fast Forward offers to try and organize something, though he warns it’s short notice. At school, Demon is called to the office, sparking a flicker of hope that someone remembered his birthday. But when he arrives, he finds Miss Barks, visibly upset.
Trying to comfort her, Demon says it’s okay that his mother forgot his birthday. At this, Miss Barks breaks down in tears and tells him the devastating news: his mother is dead. Shocked, Demon asks how it happened, and Miss Barks responds with one word: “Oxy.” Demon asks what Oxy is.
Analysis
In these chapters, the foster care system is portrayed as deeply flawed, prioritizing convenience and appearances over the well-being of children. Miss Barks, while empathetic and well-meaning, is constrained by bureaucracy, unable to intervene on behalf of boys like Tommy and Swap-Out, who are under a different agency’s jurisdiction. Her limited ability to act underscores the systemic failures that leave vulnerable children like Demon to fend for themselves.
These chapters also critique the larger sociopolitical systems that shape the boys' environment. The collapse of government support for tobacco farmers mirrors the unraveling of community structures that once offered some stability. The combination of economic hardship, rural isolation, and predatory systems like the foster care network compounds the vulnerabilities of children like Demon and his peers. The declining tobacco industry serves as a powerful symbol of the community’s struggles. Tobacco, once a source of pride and economic stability, becomes a metaphor for the stubborn clinging to identity in the face of collapse. The irony is stark: the very crop that sustains these families financially also ties them to an exploitative system that perpetuates their suffering.
The moment when Demon asks what Oxy is carries a heavy sense of dramatic irony, amplifying the tragedy of his circumstances. As readers, we know that OxyContin and other opioids have already begun to devastate his community, including his mother, whose death marks the end of her struggle with addiction. Demon’s naivety about Oxy at this point highlights how deeply entrenched the opioid epidemic is in his world, even as he remains unaware of its name or nature. This dramatic irony underscores the systemic failures surrounding him—neither he nor his peers are equipped with the education or resources to understand the substances that will shape their lives and futures.
Miss Barks' question of what he wants to be when he grows up, a standard inquiry meant to inspire hope or ambition, lays bare how survival, not aspiration, has been the core of Demon’s existence. His inability to envision a future reflects the pervasive neglect and instability he has endured, which have conditioned him to focus on immediate survival rather than long-term goals. The simplicity of his answer—wanting to still be alive—underscores both his resilience and the bleakness of his outlook. It highlights a profound failure of the systems and people meant to nurture him, as the most fundamental aspects of safety and stability have been absent from his life.
In contrast, Demon’s artistic abilities show a vibrant and dynamic engagement with the world around him. His drawings allow him to process his environment and emotions in ways that words and immediate reflection cannot. By creating fantastical versions of those around him—transforming Fast Forward into a superhero, Creaky into a villain, and his peers into allies—Demon exercises a form of agency that he otherwise lacks in his real life. Through art, he reshapes his world, framing himself and others in ways that empower him, even if only in his imagination. This creative outlet gives him a means to understand and critique his circumstances, and it eventually becomes a tool for reclaiming his identity and telling his story on his own terms.
